Whywould a USB device cause Windows 7 to slow down?

DocOliver

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I have recently encountered a problem with my computer that took me over a month of investigation to figure out. I first noticed it when I upgraded my old single core AMD to an Intel quad core system. When trying to play Starcraft 2 on the newer system, the game would run at half speed; units were slow in general, and the clock in timed missions were taking 2.5 seconds to count off 1 second. I originally thought that I had fixed the problem by changing display settings to max performance. I recently picked up SWTOR, and had no problems running it at first. After a recent Windows update, the problem came back and was affecting SWOR as well.

After checking all my settings, I noticed that the update had reset my power and display settings to default, so I changed them again but this time the problem remained. That's when I started noticing that the entire system seemed to be acting in slow motion, not just the afore mentioned games. After checking with Microsoft answers and following their cookie-cutter support advice, I came across a thread on an obscure forum about someone having a similar problem, only to discover that a USB mouse was the root cause. So, I unplugged all of my USB devices and re-booted. Lo and behold, Windows was lightning fast again, and the games are now running normally. I have ruled out my mouse as the culprit, and am suspecting a SD card reader I had plugged in as the cause.

How can a simple card reader cause the entire OS to slow down like this?

Note: the slow down never affected oled games like Diablo 2.
 
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aicom

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When a USB device gets into the weeds or a new device is connected, the USB controller driver will issue a port reset. Depending on the HCI of the port (EHCI, UHCI, OHCI, or XHCI) sometimes the port reset will have to spin on a port control register (other types are interrupt-driven) until the reset complete bit is set (or the reset bit is clear). This spinning causes the USB driver to use up more significantly CPU time than it normal would. It's not usually noticeable, but if the resets cascade, it may start to cause problems. If the SD controller is acting out of spec or something, that can cause the USB mass storage driver to issue a port reset. If the behavior repeats, a loop of resets would result.
 
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StitchCat

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This problem with slow boot due to misplaced USB device can get REALLY NASTY on some machines, like my HP Pavilion Elite HPE (which I really love):

If you accidentally leave a USB flash-chip plugged into the upper-leftmost port on the Pavilion's front panel (or whatever is the primary USB port on your machine), the computer will attempt to boot from that device rather than the hard disk. Chances are that your USB device is not actually a boot device, and so the boot will abort with a cryptic "Cannot find boot device" message.

This is a traditional annoyance we've seen for years on Windows machines: All you needed to do was pull out the device and then recycle the power switch to get the correct reboot.

BUT NOW IT'S TOXIC:

The aborted boot process somehow maims the bus environment around the AMD Radeon Graphics Controller. From now on, crucial vector graphics operations will be detoured into software emulation, causing most "cool" visual effects to crawl at half speed, including the dancing lights in all Windows7 boot-ups, including the animation of windows maximizing and minimizing, games, Flash animations, etc.

If you navigate to HP Support Assistant >> Troubleshoot >> Graphics, Video and Display, you can run a diagnostic on your AMD Radeon chip and it will FAIL. (Oddly enough, the diagnostics available through the Windows7 Control Panel Devices manager all seem to say the chip is healthy). Incredibly, you cannot fix this problem by downloading a fresh copy of the chip's driver software and reloading it into the chip.

THE ONLY SOLUTION I have found is to completely reset the machine back to its factory state. This entails about 45 minutes, and it will delete ALL files and software you have installed. (One way to do this is through Control Panel's "Recovery" feature: Click on the little "Advanced Recovery Options" link and choose to reset back to factory condition.)

The bottom line: NEVER, EVER, plug a USB storage device into your computer's primary USB port: You might forget to remove it if your machine restarts.
 

QsD

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I think I have a similar problem. I want to post it somewhere, because I had a hard time finding the answer.
I bought a new mouse (Evoluent VerticalMouse4), and around that time my computer (Intel core duo - ATI HD GPU- Windows 7) became slow. Especially 'grafical stuff' became slow. Like closing a (Windows) Explorer: the task in the taskbar would close really slowly. Normally it just dissapeares instantly, but now you saw it shrinking (and it took more then a second). Also webgames (flash?) became really choppy, and of course 3D games.
I was not at every boot. Eventuelly, I installed Evoluent VerticalMouse drivers, updated grafic drivers,... no effect.

Eventually found out it was linked to my new mouse. Booting my PC with the mouse connected resulted in the slowing down. Unplugging it after boot had no effect. Booting without the mouse connected solved the problem (even if I plug it in afterwards).

I now solved it completely by DISABLING 'LEGACY USB' in my BIOS!
I hope this might help someone in the future. It took me about a month to narrow it down (was acutally on the point of reinstalling completely).
 
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herrcafe

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I recently experienced similar problems with a Transcend SDHC 64GB card. I'm permanently doing data analysis with my laptop and the cheap and mobile storage allowed by SDHC cards is a good match to my highly portable Vaio Z21. I purchased this specific SDHC card over 4 years ago together with the laptop. Since then, both the SDHC and the laptop's SSD have been doing their fair share of reading and writing. I started getting SMART warnings for the SSD a couple months ago. If I remember correctly I got the SMART warnings in February and by March I had already replaced the SSD, so everything was good as usual. A couple of weeks ago I started noticing some abrupt and inexplicable slowdowns that I easily identified the SD card as the source (removing the SD card would resume operations at normal speed). I got a Lexar SDHC 256GB, restored the data to the new card, and voila, no more issues. At least in my case it looks like the SD card was dying and the system was having a hard time to write and read data from it (not coincidentally the SD card run just as long as the SSD drive). Not sure if this helps, but in my case it most certainly wasn't the card reader or the controller. It's just the the SD card -- and perhaps the USB drive in your case -- has simply run its course.
 

KublaiKhan

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So I'm Googling around to learn if others have shared in my pain. I have learned that having USB hard drives plugged into my Windows 7 64-bit machine quadruples my boot time; where POST would once flow by quickly, it instead stops and takes painfully long rests. Unplug the USB hard drives, and the problem goes away. These are Western Digital USB 2.0 drives.
 
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bastiaan0741

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I had the same issue with one mouse and all usb keyboards on my previous system, which i resolved by using a traditional usb mouse (the other one was a gaming mouse with its own LED) and using an old keyboard with a ps/2 connector. it was only noticeable in one game, but made it unplayable.
Now, with my new system, and the same game, i have the same issue. too bad the mobo no longer supports ps/2. No sollution as of yet, i will try and check the bios and update usb drivers.
 

michael.stenlund

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This also on Win 10 (32 and 64 bit). Hi everyone! For those of you still having this issue on newer systems - my system is a 3 day old new Ryzen 64-bit Win 10 system and I had this happen, and we're talking... extreme system slow-down that made me sweat... then read on.

A general solution to this problem is plug in the external drive to a USB hub that you have attached to your system, or if you do not own a hub, plug in the USB cord to the back of your computer and try that. Both solutions worked for me. It is the frontal USB on the case that causes this 'bug' to happen.
 

KublaiKhan

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Legacy USB?

Hmmm....
 

michael.stenlund

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Hi,
Legacy USB or 'USB Emulation' is known as an "option that only provides support of the USB ports during boot up and for other activities when the operating system isn't fully loaded. Otherwise the USB ports are inactive until Windows loads the necessary drivers. " -- Dell's support website.